Pelham Horton Box

Pelham Horton Box (1898-1937) was a British historian, best known for his book ''The Origins of the Paraguayan War'' (1930): the first to attempt to find out, by a comprehensive investigation of the available documents, what caused the most lethal war in South American history.

Box was described as a Trotskyist with a sense of humour, but in general his book is not written from an explicitly Marxist perspective. In its estimation Paraguay's authoritarian ruler Francisco Solano López was vain, ambitious, brutal, and politically and diplomatically inept; even so, the book rejects the "mad dictator" theory of the war's origins, according to which López alone was to blame for the disaster, and looks to a web of antecedent causes. Provided by Wikipedia